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Getting a Ph.D. is an intellectually exciting experience. It can also be very painful. Roughly 40,000 doctoral students graduate each year in the United States. Most of them bear the scars of what is too often a lonely and difficult rite of passage. They all could have benefited from seeing the lighter side of the doctoral process, and that is what "The Ph.D. Survival Guide" provides. Learn how to pick a school based on its location, plead for acceptance, identify subspecies of Homo doctoratus, avoid professorial deadwood, select courses that aren't lethal, qualify for a platinum copying card, raise jargon to an art form, interact with unsympathetic friends and family members, footnote one's way to nirvana, suck up to secretaries, survive the dissertation defense without crying, and reenter the real world. "The Ph.D. Survival Guide" blends humor with advice that will help doctoral students graduate more or less in one piece.

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I love telling dramatic, sometimes wondrous, and often tragic stories about people, commerce, maritime history, and the environment. My goal is to entertain and inform, and leave people glad that they took the time to read one of my books.

My most recent book is Brilliant Beacons: A History of the American Lighthouse(Liveright (a division of W. W. Norton), April 2016), received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist, and was heralded as "terrific" by Entertainment Weekly, "fascinating" by the Seattle Times, and "splendid history" by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. According to the author of Over the Edge of the World, Laurence Bergreen, “What Moby-Dick is to whales, Brilliant Beacons is to lighthouses—a transformative account of a familiar yet mystical subject."

Before that I wrote When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail (Liveright (a division of W. W. Norton), September 2012), which was chosen by Kirkus Reviews as one of the top ten non-fiction books for the Fall 2012. My Fur, Fortune, and Empire: the Epic History of the Fur Trade in America (W. W. Norton, 2010), a national bestseller, which was chosen by New West, The Seattle Times, and The Rocky Mountain Land Library as one of the top non-fiction books of 2010. It also won the 2011 James P. Hanlan Book Award, given by the New England Historical Association, and was awarded first place in the Outdoor Writers Association of America, Excellence in Craft Contest. Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America (W. W. Norton, 2007), was selected as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by The Los Angeles Times , The Boston Globe , and The Providence Journal . Leviathan was also chosen by Amazon.com's editors as one of the 10 best history books of 2007. Leviathan garnered the 23rd annual (2007) L. Byrne Waterman Award, given by the New Bedford Whaling Museum, for outstanding contributions to whaling research and history. Leviathan also received the 2007 John Lyman Award for U. S. Maritime History, given by the North American Society for Oceanic History, was named an Honors Book in nonfiction for the 8th annual Massachusetts Book Awards (2008-2009), and was awarded a silver medal for history in the Independent Publisher Book Awards (2008).

Thanks for reading, and please let me know if you have any thoughts, questions, or musings you would like to share. For more, see http://www.ericjaydolin.com.